


it's with hands that are dying and resurrected (what good is a prayer that goes unheard?)

by nikeforova



Series: fire lord zuko; princess azula [3]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Azula (Avatar) Redemption, Character Study, Gen, Healing, azula needs a hug and so does zuko, azula was (and is) a CHILD, if you have a bad relationship with your father this fic's for you, they both go to therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27546079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikeforova/pseuds/nikeforova
Summary: In, out. In, out. The sun isn’t in the sky right now, but it hasn’t disappeared--she can feel it on the other side of the Earth, gently pulling her. She hasn’t been able to direct any fire seriously since--Well. For a while, at least.Azula thinks of the stars above her burning white and blue and orange and wants to pick one from the sky and hold it in her palm, cradling it, and say: it’s not your fault you burn this way.Or: the fic where Azula returns to Caldera after inpatient therapy, befriends some messenger pigeons, and starts healing the open wound between home and heart.
Series: fire lord zuko; princess azula [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1847761
Comments: 10
Kudos: 25





	it's with hands that are dying and resurrected (what good is a prayer that goes unheard?)

**Author's Note:**

> hi! sorry if you've already seen this. i had to repost bc the archive formatting was being REALLY wonky. :)
> 
> title taken from the poem "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem" by Bob Hicok (first half) and the song "(If) the Book Doesn't Sell" by Ritt Momney (second half).
> 
> on azula: god. she deserves so much more. i just think siblings are neat!!! for me, i think azula is one of the most complex villains ever because she's extraordinarily powerful but she's also literally a child soldier that's been manipulated and turned against the people that are supposed to love her her entire life. living with ozai seems a very "eat or be eaten" type of environment (because he's a piece of shit abusive father) and neither azula nor zuko deserved that. they each are such complex characters with such different roles and relationships to their shared father and i think sometimes we sleep on that? idk.

1.

After finally returning to the castle, there’s nobody in the entirety of Caldera that trusts her as much as Zuko.

(That's not saying much, to be honest. Azula knows this like she knows herself--uneasily.)

She doesn’t know whether it’s because he knows she can’t hurt him, or something else. It stings a little, but she gets it.

However, when all is said and done, it does mean that she’s free to wander the castle as she wants, firebend where she wants--although Zuko had tersely added that they weren’t fighting a war anymore, the unsaid undercurrent being _violence is out of the question._

The castle is awful; nobody can look her in the eyes. She chooses to wander the city instead, looking for one of those things that she’ll only recognize once she sees it. She’s sure of it.

She doesn't find it.

2.

Learning (or more accurately: trying) how to firebend again is painful. How do you say _I lit a lantern today without flinching_ with pride when a year ago you toppled an entire city? There’s a hole in her heart and she’s flinging herself at it and using her hands to patch it, and all she can hear is the sound of lightning, and healing is so awfully slow. It only takes a second to crack a bone, and sometimes it never heals right.

Azula desperately hopes that whatever’s jaggedly shattered inside her right now will mend at all. Not everybody has people around that will set bones correctly, she thinks bitterly, and goes back to trying to set a single leaf on fire.

Later, Zuko stops by her room with dried tear trails on his cheeks and bags under his eyes--he’s been re-negotiating aid for the former island colonies for days, now, and she suspects it’s markedly more difficult when the Avatar isn’t there--and asks her how her day was. She doesn’t call him on it.

“Good,” she says, even though it wasn’t, and looks at the clock behind her. “Have you slept yet?” It’s not kind, but it’s not mean, either, and she at least is offering _something_. 

He pauses. Azula doesn’t let him even start what she knows will probably be a lie.

“Come on. I’ll walk you back to the other side of the palace.”

She doesn’t even know why she offers, not really, but she can’t take it back once she’s said it.

Zuko looks at her with surprise, eyebrows shooting up, then nods.

Azula racks her head for believable reasons she would have offered to leave her room a couple months ago. The thing is that she simply wouldn’t have offered in the first place."

“I have to check in on the pigeons, and your room is on the way anyways,” she forces out.

For a split second, Zuko looks as if he wants to tell her he knows she’s lying, which is an expression she knows a little bit too well, but he lets it pass. He steps aside, making space for her, and they start walking down the hall that seems to stretch on forever.

They stop outside the hallway adjacent to the wing of the palace where Zuko sleeps. It’s too large for such a small figure, she thinks. Much too large for one person, in any case. She remembers a time where they lived together, not in two bedrooms in completely different wings of a frankly unreasonably gargantuan building--not fondly, but rather with a sudden anger. In her mind, Ozai is sometimes a father, and sometimes, he is a thief, and maybe he’s more of a thief than he ever was a father. 

Zuko gestures at a small passageway that she’s never taken before. “If you’re going to visit the pigeons, you should probably turn here. It takes much longer if you have to go up the stairs on the other side, and you’ll end up in the same spot--just the other side and a little down the hall, so all you have to do is take the stairs.”

She had almost forgotten that she said she would visit the pigeons--a harsh reply is already forming in the back of her mind, but Zuko’s eyes are friendly, not aggressive. It dawns on Azula that he means it to be helpful: to make sure she doesn’t waste her time with an inefficient route, rather than point out that she was wrong. 

There’s a pause where it feels like they both _should_ say something, and it’s on the tip of Azula’s dry tongue, but she can’t quite get it to leave her mouth, and it passes. She opts to nod stiffly as a replacement, and Zuko returns the gesture, a small smile gracing his lips.

Maybe, she thinks, watching Zuko disappear into the dimly lit corridor, there are people who care about her broken bones. Maybe she’s just the one who has to wrench it all back into place.

She wonders how much that type of healing hurts.

(She does end up visiting the pigeons. They're not as annoying as she remembers them to be--kind of sweet, actually).

3.

Azula dreams of Ozai most nights. More specifically, she dreams of running, but her feet never seem to fly fast enough. How is it that she can run from everything but her own father?

Ozai is in prison, somewhere--she doesn’t even know where, better to exile that man in irrelevance--and somehow he’s still all over the palace.

She wakes up with a gasp. There’s the tang of electricity on her tongue, cold metal and a white-hot glow on burns that still haven’t healed. Those types of burns never do. 

_Good,_ thinks Azula fiercely, that the throne has been inherited by somebody who despises him as much as she does. Moreover, a boy who’s the opposite of Ozai. God, who would’ve thought?

It’s raining in Caldera for the first time in ages. No lightning. It’s calm, and wet, and Azula opens the window and breathes.

 _In, out. In, out._ The sun isn’t in the sky right now, but it hasn’t disappeared--she can feel it on the other side of the Earth, gently pulling her. She hasn’t been able to direct any fire seriously since--

Well. For a while, at least.

Azula thinks of the stars above her burning white and blue and orange and wants to pick one from the sky and hold it in her palm, cradling it, and say: it’s not your fault you burn this way.

4.

They’re both sitting in the old throne room looking at the ceiling, where Zuko found Azula on the marble floor, legs crossed and dress layers discarded. The cavernous room is exactly as suffocating without Ozai in it as it was when he was. Azula wonders whether this room is a product of that man or the other way around.

“Did you know,” she says slowly, “that blue fire is capable of melting rock?”

Zuko looks up from where he’s been studying the floor.

“I could do it, you know,” Azula says. “Torch the whole fucking place to the ground.”

Zuko shrugs, but it’s not casual. It’s practiced indifference, a natural defense he’s put up.

“I believe you. If you want to, you can.” _We don’t use this room anymore_ is left unspoken.

Azula feels like crying. She doesn’t know how to say _I want to, but it won’t fix anything,_ _and I can’t even firebend right now,_ so she settles for repeating herself.

“I could do it. I really could,” she says again. She doesn’t quite know whether she’s trying to convince herself or Zuko.

Zuko looks at her with understanding written all over his face--she’s sure he wishes he didn’t know why she’s so angry--and says nothing for a bit.

They stand in silence.

“You were always a very good firebender. Still are.”

“Not really,” she says.

Zuko sighs. “As long as the sun is in the sky, Azula, you’ll be a firebender. Be patient with yourself. None of that skill left--it’s all still in you, waiting to be tended to.”

Azula doesn’t reply. It doesn’t feel that there’s much fire anywhere in her at all.

5.

Azula faintly recalls the concept of grief in the only form she's ever known: her mother, standing at a headstone. At nine, the only thing she knew about grief was that it wasn't made for her.

At fifteen, Azula was made out of edges--always going somewhere, always the hunter. At seventeen, she doesn’t know what her shape is at all.

It's rather fitting, she thinks, that she is thinking about shape in a place that seems to always moving--the air temple seems to be fluid, as if the stone has turned into a river in front of her eyes. The air is thin and stinging, and Azula feels small. It whips around her incessantly, reminding her that this place is not her home. 

She clears her throat. “I’m visiting,” she says softly, “that’s all. I’m not going in.”

It is not her site to mourn at, that much she knows. The most she can do is sit on the rocks outside and bow her head. The towering stone is beautiful; grasses are peeking out from between the carved stone that she’s sure was once carefully maintained.

What is a home without its people? She doesn’t know. There are things that somehow stay together even when one’s long gone--mothers and their children, perhaps--but a home without its people seems to be lost completely. Azula thinks of the longing in Zuko’s voice when he said he wanted to go _home_. 

She did never really quite knew where that was. 

She’s ready to leave. The sun is shining, and Zuko’s probably waiting back where she left him with Appa, and there’s a little girl crying in front of what she knows is a tomb (except the child looks awfully like her, and Azula knows there’s nothing she can do about it except tell her to run away, run far away before somebody sharpens her into a knife and tells her she was made to cut things).

6.

Maybe, thinks Azula, I can find a home somewhere. Caldera seems to push at her, saying _get away,_ yelling _I have not healed yet._ The pigeons coo in their loft, taking flight into the burnt sky as the sun crests the horizon, and a young one--at most a couple days old--comes to sit on her finger. The mother looks on warily, but there's no squawk of alarm. 

(No _stay away from those fingers that made lightning, child. Beware._ )

She feels warm. It's a beautiful morning, and the sun is thrumming in her veins, and her legs are ready to run _towards_ something for the first time in her life. She's got a couple hundred gold pieces in her room--those will definitely pay for as many tickets as she could ever want--and a some Kyoshi Island-style robes in her closet. Nothing that would identify her as, well, whoever she is right now, but she doesn't want to think about that too hard right now. Some hurts are still too tender to touch.

(She wonders how she would look if she let somebody cut her hair, and whether anybody will say anything about her eyes. She's long since abandoned her signature hairstyle anyhow.)

The spiral staircase in front of her seems to say _I'll still be here when you come back, you know_ , and she watches as the youngling flies back to its mother.

She takes off.

(For the first time, she gets to say goodbye.)

(That is: there is something to perhaps come home to, someday.)

**Author's Note:**

> my twitter is @lovepo3ms if u wanna say hi!


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